Passing Fancies (A Julia Kydd Novel)

by Marlowe Benn

  She was right. The ladies’ lounge was crowded with a dozen or more avid conversations dissecting the social niceties of who had spoken with whom at which restaurant last week, of whose daughter had caught the eye of which up-and-comer from Yale or Princeton or Wall Street. Julia settled onto a padded velvet stool beside the long marble counter, drew an ashtray close, and commenced to enjoy one of the Régies she’d filched from Philip’s unattended case. To her surprise, another woman edged in beside her and spoke her name.

  It was Mrs. Macready, whom Julia knew only as Philip’s mysterious friend. They’d met in a predawn encounter last fall in Philip’s library when neither woman (nor Philip) had been dressed in more than a hastily pulled-on dressing gown. Clearly she was Philip’s lover, of sorts, but beyond that Julia couldn’t discern and Philip would not say. All she knew was that their relationship seemed intensely private.

  She looked radiant, her beautiful hair a more auburn shade than Julia remembered but still lustrous, dressed in a becoming loose chignon. She wore a stunning gown of ivory chiffon with a collar of rubies at her throat.

  “Leah Macready,” she said, as if Julia might not recall their extraordinary acquaintance. “You look ravishing tonight, my dear.” She squeezed Julia’s hand. “You have an exquisite dressmaker.”

  Julia repaid the compliment. She hesitated and then decided the shroud over Christophine’s talent would combust if she didn’t lift it just a bit. She admitted that she had the rare good fortune to employ one of New York’s undiscovered talents. She lifted the underside of her frock’s hem, where Christophine had stitched a slender curl of the chartreuse organdy across the blue satin. No one could see it, except in a swirling flash as she danced.

  “That’s marvelous,” Leah Macready breathed. “I’d love to see more of her work.”

  Julia explained her modiste’s preferences for anonymity but said she hoped to soften those restrictions. She’d already confided too much. Mrs. Macready sighed, thanked her for her candor, and lamented that she’d be missed if she didn’t return to her party. Julia waited another ten minutes and followed her out.

  She rejoined the men in time to hear Kessler grumble cryptically, “Two weeks, then. Not a day more.”

  Julia had no sooner caught Philip’s eye—Anything?—and perceived a satisfying glimmer in reply than she heard with alarm a voice approaching from behind, slurred with alcohol and venom. She recognized it with dread: Willard Wright. He must have seen her crossing the room and followed. She dropped quickly into a chair, but his weaving rant drew closer. Detestable man. He was known to hover like a vulture, sniffing out any fresh morsels of gossip about the city’s latest salacious crime, and Timson’s murder would be a banquet. He pestered even vague acquaintances in search of fodder for those infernal detective novels he kept threatening to write.

  “Gentlemen,” Wright said, leaning over Julia’s chair. “Drumbeats in Harlem? Murderous moll on the loose? Do tell.”

  Kessler reached for his brandy. “You know I can’t comment.”

  “Go home, Wright,” Philip said, twisting to turn his good ear away from the man. Julia suppressed a smile, knowing how Wright would interpret his subsequent failure to hear properly as a personal affront. She’d done as much—understandably!—last fall before Mrs. Macready had enlightened her to Philip’s deafness.

  Jack added, more kindly, “You’re drunk.”

  “I’ve neglected my lovely guest,” Wallace said abruptly, touching Julia’s arm. “Please excuse us.”

  Julia thought the men did so with unusual alacrity. Perhaps to protect her from Wright’s baiting, or perhaps to dispatch him in terms they’d rather she not hear. It didn’t matter. She too wanted well away from the unpleasant man.

  Wallace danced beautifully. Time and the simple immediacies—that French scent, the muscles beneath his jacket—ought to have dissolved all cares for the world beyond his arms, but Julia resisted long enough to ask, “Two weeks?”

  Wallace considered her with an expression she couldn’t interpret. Apology? Pity? Regret? “Nothing to trouble you, my dear.”

  “Is it about Eva Pruitt?” Her feet slowed. “Is she all right?”

  He regripped her hand, caressing her fingers. “I admire your concern for our mutual friend. I can only say I’m doing everything I can to protect her. Trust me. There’s nothing to worry about.” His other hand resettled too, cupping the bare curve of her lower back, and the subject was closed.

  Later, as the heavy Duesenberg moved through a plum-streaked Manhattan daybreak, the weight of countless champagne toasts and a blur of brandies drove Julia’s head into the smooth leather upholstery. Her thoughts spun with the turn of the motorcar. What had Philip said? That Wallace preferred debutantes and their mothers. She was nothing like either.

  The liquor pinned her eyes shut, but every thought in her head tracked his attentions traveling her throat, ear, cheekbone, nose, lips.

  “I’m told to beware your seductive charms,” Julia teased. His scent was intoxicating.

  Wallace drew back. Jaw in his palm, his elbow sank into the cushion beside her head. He stroked the skin behind her ear. “Seductive? Not at all. I defer to your wishes.” His fingers slid into her hair. “What would you have me do next, Miss Kydd?”

  Julia tasted the warmth of his cognac. Desire twisted awake, curling her spine and lifting her chin. Her eyes opened with the deep pull of it. Stately stone buildings, glowing in the early dawn, slid past the car’s window like fat pink pearls.

  “Say good night, Mr. Wallace.”

  CHAPTER 18

  “At last,” Philip said late the next morning when Julia pushed open the library doors. “I was about to crash a few minor chords to rouse you.”

  It was just before noon, hardly cause for comment. Julia suspected the coffee in his cup was freshly brewed, not stale and cooling as he’d have her think. She yawned and filled a cup from the pot beside his chair, remembering it was Christophine’s Sunday out. Apart from any other qualities the man claimed to possess, knowing his way around a kitchen seemed to Julia among the most useful.

  Philip watched her with maddening attention. Was her hair standing upright? Her robe’s collar askew? His eyebrows rose in comical inquiry. Damn him. What was so funny?

  It took just one swallow, and her focus returned. Last night. The conclave between Kessler, Philip, and Wallace she had not been allowed to join. Philip was mocking her slow-awakening wits. Wasn’t she perishing to learn what he had heard? The apartment had been dark last night when she’d returned, and she’d assumed he’d retired—or was still out.

  “Yes, yes—so tell me.” She pulled up a chair. “Has Kessler found Eva’s manuscript?”

  Philip shook his head. “Not for lack of trying. The poor man is flummoxed. He’s had men combing the neighborhood, inside and out, but no scrap of it’s turned up. He did discover how the killer got in and out, though.”

  “Not the obvious way?” Julia sat forward. “Is there another?”

  “Turns out there’s a second stairway. Not surprising, really, in those old buildings. It leads from the back alleyway—a painted-over door behind the rubbish bins and coal chute—up to the apartment.”

  “I saw only two rooms, the office and a little bedroom Eva used to get ready between shows. There was nothing even resembling a door. Where is it?”

  “In the lavatory, apparently. I suppose a well-directed tap or firm twist to some finial, and the linen cupboard swings out to reveal the passageway. Hobart danced a fine jig as Kessler’s men turned the place inside out, and no wonder. Turns out they use the passage to stash bootlegged liquor. Crates and crates of the stuff.”

  Julia considered this, not the bootlegging but the secret passage. Why was it there at all? She could think of several possibilities, well beyond providing access to a commode for the distressed pedestrian below. Most obviously it offered access to and from Timson’s rooms without alerting his guards. The killer had to be someone well acquain
ted with the club’s layout and operations. One of those armed brutes seemed most likely.

  “It’s quite the spice route,” Philip went on. “One door opens into a coat closet in the manager’s office downstairs—”

  Julia interrupted. “Bobby Hobart. I knew it. Or one of Timson’s guards. I saw it in their eyes, Philip. They’re killers. Probably many times over.”

  “In their eyes?” Philip leaned close to peer into hers. “A wild glint? The pallor of a dead soul? The smudge of eternal damnation?”

  She clapped a hand over her eyes to thwart his mocking gaze. “Something. Killing changes a person. It must.”

  He sat back, briefly somber. “You have no idea.”

  For a fraction of a second she wondered if he’d ever killed a person. Shocking thought! In the war? She knew only that he’d served as some kind of attaché, far from any actual shooting. But before she could ask, he said, “Kessler needs more than garrulous peepers. He’s checked those fellows’ alibis a hundred times, and nothing has budged yet, but I agree there’s nothing more intriguing than the airtight alibi. Still, I’m afraid that deuced passageway keeps meandering. There’s another entry point behind a mirror in the biggest backstage dressing room. Eva Pruitt’s dressing room.”

  “Damn!” Julia didn’t apologize for her unseemly outburst. Her heart fell. This explained how Eva and Jerome had gotten upstairs that night. They’d arrived after Julia and the others but come in through the back bedroom. She had wondered only vaguely at the time. “I bet Kessler leaped to all sorts of conclusions about that.”

  “Only the obvious ones. And theories, not conclusions.”

  “But anyone could have used those stairs, coming from the alley or from Hobart’s office.”

  “Or her dressing room. Much as you want to see your friend exonerated, Julia, you have to think like a detective and look at all possibilities.”

  He was right, of course. Moving on, she asked, “What did Mr. Wallace have to say? He seemed intent on talking to Kessler about something, I assumed about Eva. Is she all right? He wouldn’t tell me much, only that she was safe.”

  Philip rolled his lips between his teeth for a moment. “Your aging suitor—”

  “Philip! Don’t be absurd. He’s not much older than you.”

  “And he preys on young—”

  “Please. Just what did he say?”

  “When Kessler needled him for doing too good a job of keeping Pruitt out of the public eye, Wallace hemmed and hawed—”

  Julia coughed in exasperation. The man she knew was incapable of hemming and hawing.

  “But finally he confessed that he’s lost her.”

  “Lost her?”

  “She’s given him the slip. Disappeared. Gone.”

  Julia tried to smother her reaction before Philip saw it. As an unofficial deputy to Kessler’s unofficial deputy, she’d agreed to help the police discover Timson’s murderer. Kessler wanted evidence to convict Eva, but Julia (and Philip, she hoped) was determined to look more widely and to ensure Eva got every benefit of the doubt. But now a new possibility surged. Was there any chance, any shred of hope, Eva had escaped? Not simply from Wallace’s supervision but from New York? Had she somehow managed to sail away to France as she’d dreamed? It was a tantalizing vision: Eva and her precious Jerome halfway across the Atlantic by now.

  Philip watched Julia’s reaction. “Kessler was less sanguine than you at the news. His reaction involved a few choice invectives. Wallace let him down rather badly.”

  “Or Eva proved more resourceful than anyone gave her credit for. She’s an intelligent and determined woman, Philip. She’d know exactly the dangers she faced. She wouldn’t simply put her fate in a few men’s hands and trust them to take care of her.” Julia spoke with conviction, though at some level she was voicing hope more than certainty. She and Eva seemed to share many instincts; surely an impulse to take charge of her own fate would be one of them.

  “She did manage to hoodwink your admirer, it seems,” Philip allowed, his inflection suggesting Wallace’s dim wits were as much to blame as Eva’s cunning.

  “How did it happen?” There was no point in tussling over blame (or credit). Julia needed to know what Wallace had told the men.

  “He said he took her to his home on Tuesday to bathe and rest. His housekeeper went to fetch some things from Eva’s apartment—which had been turned over pretty well by Kessler’s men. She reported that hoodlums had been there as well, defacing her things and leaving nasty messages on the walls.”

  Julia grimaced. She’d known Eva wouldn’t be safe there, but even unseen the graphic assault unsettled her.

  “Unfortunately, that led to new problems. The next morning, his housekeeper, a Mrs. Hoskins, laid down a law of her own. Apparently she refused to countenance Miss Pruitt living under her roof. Wallace said she feared it put them all in danger—though the man must live in a virtual fortress, given the circles he moves in.”

  Before Julia could challenge his unsavory insinuation, Philip went on. “But it turned out the real rub was that she did not care to be waiting on a colored guest, even though she’s black as coal herself.” He smiled at the absurdity.

  It made sense to Julia, though, after hearing Eva’s tales of being resented and mistrusted by some darker Negroes. She’d explain it to him later. “What did he do?”

  “When a good housekeeper says jump, one jumps. He moved Miss Pruitt into a vacant apartment in a building he owns up on West 141st. He claimed the tenants there keep to their own business and thought she’d be safe there. Kessler was none too pleased he hadn’t been consulted or even informed about the move.”

  Julia could well imagine his outburst at the news, and she silently applauded Wallace’s initiative. Kessler would have simply taken her back into custody. Once Eva entered a cell, Julia feared she’d never be allowed to leave it. “For her own safety” would become a prison sentence of its own.

  “And that’s when she got away?”

  Philip nodded. “Vanished, according to Wallace.”

  A terrible thought occurred. Surely he would have said. But she had to ask. “Was there any sign of trouble? That she’d been forced to leave? That maybe Timson’s men took her?”

  He shook his head. “Wallace swore he saw nothing untoward.” The vague word encompassed a multitude of scenarios best left unimagined, and Julia was grateful for its abstraction, leaving her thoughts clear for the immediate purposes.

  “So what happens now?”

  “Shall I quote?” Philip lit a fresh Régie. “After the juicier expletives, I believe cherchez la femme crossed a few lips. Kessler turned a few shades closer to scarlet, and I had to remind him to breathe. He blamed me, complaining that no one would have to cherchez at all if I hadn’t badgered him to release the lady.”

  “Thank God you did, or she’d be pilloried to high heaven by now.” A week without an arrest had the newspapers in a frenzy, as Wright had pointed out.

  She glanced at the mantel clock. “Sergeant Hannity must be spitting daggers.” A week ago the man had been prowling about this very room badgering her for information about that evening at Carlotta’s. Seven long yet fruitless days ago. “What does Kessler intend to do?”

  “Oh, he wants her found pronto, as you’d expect. Wallace did some pretty fancy talking, claiming he’s in a better position to retrieve her with no one the wiser. He swore he’d see to it himself.”

  “He’s right. Wallace knows those neighborhoods. He can make sure it’s done on the sly, with a well-placed word here and there.”

  “Quite possibly,” Philip agreed, “though Kessler’s understandably more chary of his word this time around. Still, what choice does he have? He’s in a tough spot. A beefy platoon of Hannity’s boys tramping around would only throw off all sorts of delicate balances. He’s convinced there are still too many raw suspicions and itchy trigger fingers in the mix. One blunder and he’d have anarchy on those streets—Timson’s aggrieved men seeking re
tribution wherever they can find it. Kessler’s worst nightmare.”

  “No one mentioned this to Wright, did they? He’d love nothing better than to see Kessler raked over the coals in the press for losing a suspect.”

  Philip shook his head. “But Kessler knows it’s only a matter of time before the press cotton on to it, and the commissioner will demand an arrest.”

  “We all know it,” Julia said. Arbitrary and expedient though it was, she knew how public officials could sacrifice almost any nicety of justice and fair play to appease a bloodthirsty public. “So what did he do?”

  “He relented. It nearly choked him to say, but he gave the fellow permission to try to find her himself.”

  “Was that what he meant by ‘two weeks’?” Julia asked, remembering his cryptic last comment as she’d rejoined the men.

  “Precisely. Kessler gave him one week, but Wallace talked him up to two. He has two weeks to find what he so carelessly misplaced, or Kessler sends in his troops.”

  “It’s not funny.” Julia protested the frivolous language. “Eva’s missing, Philip, not misplaced. She could be in danger.”

  “Danger?” Philip tapped off his ashes. “I doubt it. Unless Wallace is more cold blooded than even I suspect, nothing about his demeanor last night suggested he feared she was in mortal peril. I think she simply gave him the slip, as he said.”

  He sat forward. “Think about it. Maybe she’s simply on a walkabout, for reasons of her own. Or she’s bolted to join her paramour. Crockett has vanished too, remember? Maybe the two of them are holed up together, hoping to ride out the storm. Regardless, she can’t go far without money or passport.”

  No passport. That meant no champagne, no shipboard dinner, no triumphant arrival at Le Havre. “How do you know that?”